Raise the Red Pen

It’s been tough lately not to follow the blow-by-blow of the recent dust-up between Google and China. Tough, that is, unless you’re one of the 1.3 billion human beings living in China, where all media accounts of the embarrassing fracas, wandering as it has over the sensitive terrain of government censorship, have been censored. Meta-censorship, let’s call it. On mainland China, any and every reference to the actual reasons for Google’s departure, and the fracas itself, have been meticulously removed from the public record by the 40,000-strong legion of government censors who maintain the Great Firewall and its many filters, sieves, traps, honeypots, hack squads, and political prisons.

Here in Vietnam, where the antennae of government officials are carefully tuned to the pronouncements of their communist counterparts in China’s bureacratic hallways, it’s been some surprise that accounts of the Google-China battle have been widely available on the Internet. Vietnam shares China’s distaste for political and religious expression; the only difference is that they lack the resources of their rich northern neighbor. The spirit is strong, you might say, but the flesh is weak. Vietnam would probably love to have a Great Firewall of their very own, but at the moment this developing economy still has to rely on foreign aid (and engineering knowhow) to build roads and bridges.

Recent word out of Mountain View, however, may change that. News reports this morning had the company lambasting a new target for alleged cyber-espionage:

Security engineers at Google Inc. and computer security company McAfee Inc. said malicious software was used to spy on government critics in Vietnam in what analysts suspect is the second major example in recent months of an Asian country trying to quash dissent on the Internet.

A posting on Google’s online security blog Tuesday said the software has targeted “potentially tens of thousands” of people who downloaded software enabling them to type in Vietnamese, and that the software was used by unknown persons to attack blogs criticizing the government’s policies. “Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country,” wrote Neel Mehta, a Google engineer.”

At the moment, reports of the story are available in Vietnam on many news sites, though the BBC’s website is unavailable. It’ll be interesting to see how long those reports continue to be available here. For that matter, it’ll be interesting to see how long this particular blog remains available.